With any system you will want to see a combination of synthetic testing and real-world. Synthetics give you a static, easily repeatable testing method that can be compared across multiple platforms. For our synthetic tests we use Everest Ultimate, Sisoft Sandra, Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage and PCMark Vantage, Cinebench as well as HyperPi. Each of these covers a different aspect of performance or a different angle of a certain type of performance.

Memory Bandwidth

Memory is a big part of current system performance. In most systems slow or flaky memory performance will impact almost every type of application you run. To test memory we use a combination of Sisoft Sandra, Everest and HyperPi 0.99.

The memory bandwidth on the GA-H57-USB3 is what you would expect from this board. As the memory controller is now on the CPU, we should start to see more similar performance between manufacturers. The drop in bandwidth on our OC testing was interesting as we tried to keep the memory at close to the same clock speed that it was at stock.

Everest Ultimate is a suite of tests and utilities that can be used for system diagnostics and testing. For our purposes here we use their memory bandwidth test and see what the theoretical performance is.

Stock Memory Performance

Overclocked Memory Performance

Again we see pretty standard performance from the GIGABYTE GA-H57-USB3. We also see the dip in memory bandwidth as we push the FSB higher, but maintain the same RAM speed.

HyperPi is a front end for SuperPi that allows for multiple concurrent instances of SuperPi to be run on each core recognized by the system. It is very dependent on CPU to memory to HDD speed. The faster these components, the faster it is able to figure out the number Pi to the selected length.

For our testing we use the 32M run. This means that each of the four physical and four logical cores for the i7 and the four physical cores of the i5 is trying to calculate the number Pi out to 32 million decimal places. Each "run" is a comparative to ensure accuracy and any stability or performance issues in the loop mentioned above will cause errors in calculation.

With HyperPi we see the GA-H57 doing well in all the runs except for our stock testing run. Here it seems to drag a little coming in a few seconds behind the H55 from ASRock.

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